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Oct 09
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How new are webcams? Not very – I remember them knocking around at least 8-10 years ago but as soon as this product was announced I knew I was going to buy it, now it’s finally arrived and quite frankly I love it.
For those (unlike me) who don’t obsessively follow gaming news I am talking about the Xbox Live Vision Camera, essentially a webcam built specifically for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 games console. As far as I can tell, this is no better or worse than an averagely priced PC webcam, at £34.99 it’s not a steal but I think it’s worth the price given that you get a free game bundled in as well. One criticism is that the bundled game has been around for ages so lots of people have already shelled out for it only to find they could have had it for free, I would have liked to see either a new game or just extra content bundled with the camera.
The camera enables you to do a few things, firstly having a video-chat with your friends over Xbox Live – this is pretty good and the picture quality is good but I was a little disappointed that you can’t be doing other things at the same time (browsing Marketplace, etc). Another neat feature is that you can now take your picture and use it as your personal ‘gamertile’ – this is only visible to your friends (to avoid people using their own backside as their avatar) but is pretty cool nonetheless. My picture at the moment is the logo from Ghostbusters which I took by pointing the camera at a DVD case.
The game that comes with the camera is UNO and is distributed via Xbox Live Arcade, to get this you must, redeem the code that comes in the pack and download the game as no disk comes in the box. The game itself is a simple but higly addictive card game and will need no introduction to most people, I didn’t know it but had played a very similar game before so picked it up really quickly. The graphics are simple but always sharp and clear, the controls are intuitive and the game is really a joy to play – it even got my non-gaming cousin interested in playing.
The video in-game replaces the the part of the screen where your avatar would normally be seen and is quite a fun addition to the gameplay, my friend Private Custard (also see website) and I spent ages just messing around with the camera whilst playing UNO – hilarious but very silly fun!